


The More Loving One

by sithblood



Category: ATEEZ (Band)
Genre: (kind of) Enemies to Lovers, Alternate Universe, Angst, Eventual Happy Ending, Fluff, Friendship, Getting Together, Grief/Mourning, Loss, M/M, Magical Realism, Neighbours to Lovers, Past Character Death, Slice of Life, Slow Burn, all my literary theory lovers make some noise! we're about to get real pretentious, hongjoong is an author, is that a tag?, kind of?, seonghwa is his dream guy... literally
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-18 09:40:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29116149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sithblood/pseuds/sithblood
Summary: “What's that?”Seonghwa looks down at the wicker basket he’s holding flush against his stomach, then back up again. He smiles, which makes a vein twitch somewhere in Hongjoong’s forehead. There’s a bottle of expensive Pinot Noir winking offensively up at him amidst all the ribbons and bows and decorative paper garnish.“A gift basket. For my favourite neighbour.”Hongjoong debates slamming the door in his face. He doesn’t, but it’s a near thing.“You’re unbearable, I hope you know that.”ORHongjoong is an author about to hit rock bottom. Seonghwa is his very familiar new neighbour.
Relationships: Choi San/Jeong Yunho, Kim Hongjoong/Original Male Character(s), Kim Hongjoong/Park Seonghwa
Comments: 9
Kudos: 29





	1. Meiosis

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title: The More Loving One – W. H. Auden.

His Korean Literature professor had once told him that if things felt stale and uninspiring, he should try looking at the world from a new perspective. Kicked all the way back in his office chair, head suspended in stasis and squeezed every which way by the invisible yet surprisingly demanding force of gravity, Hongjoong repeats his professor’s advice out loud to his audience of one. The upside-down view of his agent’s face doesn’t change much, save for a slight pursing of the lips. Tough crowd.

“Very literal, Hongjoong-ssi. Impressive.”

Yunho only uses formal honorifics if he’s angry with him. The light from the far window falls across Hongjoong’s upturned line of sight, refracting through the double-glazing to warm the artful shabby-chic of his apartment interior. He follows the rays as if he’s skipping stones – one, bouncing over the crest of his sofa, alighting on the unclean lip of a forgotten dinner plate. Another, leaping to settle deep into the crevices of his bedsheets, still unmade late into the day. Yunho drums his fingertips into the nice leather of his designer coat, a habitual tic he hasn’t managed to shake as long as Hongjoong’s known him. Too long, if you asked either of them.

“You should be encouraging me, Yunho-ah! The doctor said a recovered sense of humour is a sign of emotional healing.”

Yunho’s brow spasms, and he kicks the leg of the office chair a little viciously. Hongjoong scrambles back upright with a laugh, cheeks flushing of their own accord as he’s nearly sent flying backwards. It reminds him of being a child, of rocking almost perpendicular to the floor in a kitchen chair or his seat at school, unafraid of what might happen if he lost balance. Unafraid of dashing his skull against the hardwood. He braces his elbows against his desk, head thick and fuzzy with an excess of blood, and closes the lid of his laptop with a flick of the wrist. Yunho harrumphs behind him.

“I get the feeling this is more of a work visit, then,” Hongjoong says without turning, fingers absently tracing the metallic groove of the laptop’s company logo. He counts the number of unwashed mugs and empty glasses on his desk, wonders what it looks like to Yunho, what he would infer from it. One, keeping an old draft of an early chapter tucked safely against the surface. Two, pressed up against last month’s invoice. A record four crowd the thick manila envelope he’d opened once then never looked at again, the one with the death certificate and the will and the life insurance papers. “And here I was, thinking you were checking up on your grieving friend. Your grieving _best_ friend.”

Yunho scoffs, or maybe laughs. Hongjoong’s too busy looking at a half-empty mug of tea and wondering how long it’s been there to pay attention. “As if you’d let me.” The window is open and the sounds of downtown Seoul in full, midday bloom wash into the apartment to take up space in the silence between them, loud and thick as smog. Regular things; a car trilling its horn, small, unintelligible splices of a stranger’s conversation. Regular and far away, from Hongjoong’s perch on the fourth floor.

“I’m almost done,” he says, because they might as well skip to the important part, he doesn’t feel like doing all the conversational foreplay today. He can hear Yunho shifting behind him, footfalls soft as he paces the length of the open-plan studio. He’s always been a compulsive mover, body adjusting to internal pressure through shivers and twitches and urgent outward motion, so different to the paralytic lethargy of Hongjoong’s own nervous response. That’s why they get along, he suspects – Yunho is a doer, a goer, the person who chooses flight over fright, and he's a sinkhole, a stone. Dead in the water.

“How done?” Yunho asks. Something in the elastic cadence of his voice makes Hongjoong turn despite himself, something in its soft, tired bend-and-snap.

“Almost,” he echoes faintly, searching the familiar planes of his childhood friend’s face. He’s standing beside Hongjoong’s sofa in a wash of afternoon sunlight, figure schismed by yellowing urban illumination – one half of him bright, the other half in shadow. His pretty, boy-soft features are made severe by the contrast, pinching into hard lines and contours. “Why?”

Yunho sighs, long-suffering, and bunches his hands in his coat pockets. He doesn’t take it off anymore; doesn’t bother. Knows that he won’t be staying long these days. “They’re pushing, Hongjoong. Really pushing. I’m asking them to be patient and they say they are, all things considered, but… well. The publisher said you’re not getting another extension, this one’s your last.”

Hongjoong stills, lets the words fall into him, lets his mind wrap itself around them. Somebody’s shouting in the street outside, the agitated staccato of their voice lost amongst the noise of traffic. “Okay,” he says.

Yunho balks; it’s clearly not the response he wanted. “Okay? Just – just okay, Hongjoong? Because I don’t think it’s okay. It doesn’t _look_ okay from where I’m standing.”

Hongjoong wants to crack a joke, something trite and unfunny about sitting down or switching positions, but he doesn’t think it would help. Yunho’s staring at him, gaze colder than he’s seen for a long time. People tend to be careful around him, nowadays. “Yeah, okay,” he says again, voice curling defensively around the last syllable. “I can do it. And if I don’t – then I don’t, do I?”

Yunho’s face twitches, mouth working as he smooths out a myriad of different emotions from his features. “Stop it, Hongjoong,” he breathes, voice colouring a few shades darker at Hongjoong’s name, the pronunciation purposeful. “That’s not funny.”

Something curdles in Hongjoong’s stomach at the sound of it, something hot and wet and mean. He shivers even though it’s warm, and suddenly feels like being difficult. “I’m not laughing, Yunho,” he says, pressing his agent’s name out in kind. Yunho closes his eyes, tongue running reflexively over his bottom lip before he replies.

“You’re gonna lose this deal,” he says, quieter. His eyes are soft when they open, more tender at their edges, and it sets Hongjoong’s teeth on edge, makes his head swim with heat and sound. He doesn’t like being pitied, not from someone he’s known for the better part of a lifetime.

“Then let me lose it, Yunho-ah. There’s no reason for _you_ to hold on.”

Yunho’s face falls lax and Hongjoong tenses, just a little, and for a moment he thinks he might shout, really shout. Thinks he might lose his temper, throw something; break something, even. The thought thrills Hongjoong, sends little tingling fissures of anticipation down his spine, makes his toes curl and his abdomen clench. For a moment the air between them is electric, and then Yunho’s blinking, eyes tired and tipped downwards, and it’s gone. Hongjoong breathes out and nothing but guilt remains, nothing but the slow, sickly ache of being a terrible friend and an even worse client.

“Call me, Hongjoong,” Yunho says, but any hopeful inflection has long since bled out of the request – Hongjoong never does. He crosses the apartment, shoulders hunched, and looks back, gaze searching. He wants to say something, and Hongjoong knows what it would sound like – _he wouldn’t have wanted you to carry on like this, Seojun would want to see you happy, do it for him_. One of those old clichés, as if Yunho or anybody else knew what his dead lover would want. As if he’d stopped by to tell them. Instead, Yunho turns the handle of the door and says, “you’ve got four months.”

For a long moment Hongjoong sits in silence and does nothing, just himself and his apartment and the afternoon sun breathing together in quiet tandem, in and out. In, and he lets his forehead bang noisily against the wooden surface of his desk, papers fluttering softly as they’re disturbed. Out, and his fingers curl into fists. He knows exactly how long he’s got, has the very last day he can feasibly send in the final draft of his manuscript marked out in bold red on his calendar, circled three times. He also knows that he’s nowhere near done, that if he turned in what he currently has saved on his laptop he’d be laughed out of the publishing house and probably a career as well. _The_ Kim Hongjoong, he can hear them say, budding young darling of the Korean literary fiction scene, washed up and jobless at twenty-five. He gets brusquely to his feet.

Nobody else lives on his floor of the apartment complex, which suits Hongjoong just fine – writers keep awful hours, and he’s never been one for neighbourly spirit. It’s one of those ugly, expensive new-builds the contractors put together as quickly as possible so they could profit off the sky-rocketing Seoul rent prices and nobody he knows whom he actually likes would ever be able to afford it, so he remains comfortably insular on the floor he’s come to think of as his own. Frankly, Hongjoong himself can’t afford it anymore – he’s paying double the rent with the same, shitty royalty cheques, now. He shoulders his way into the lift, glancing through the notifications on his phone as he presses the button for the ground floor – a missed call from Yeosang, his editor; a string of irreverent texts from Wooyoung about something inane that had happened at work that day; a lone, carefully crafted message from San asking if he needs anything. Hongjoong scowls and deletes it; Yunho had probably put him up to that one.

 _u should be nicer 2 ur clients they pay ur wages_ , Hongjoong types out in reply to Wooyoung as he wanders up to the front desk, nodding at the two receptionists on duty. They’re both younger than him, which is depressing, a pair of university students desperate enough to work shitty hours for even shittier pay, but Hongjoong gets on well with them despite the age difference. Well enough to be able to hold a conversation when he occasionally comes down to pick up takeaways or check his post, anyway.

The younger and shorter of the two looks up, round face breaking into a smile. “How’s the book going, Hongjoong-ssi?” Jongho asks, shuffling over to lean thick forearms against the shiny laminate of the desktop. He imagines any distraction is a welcome respite from standing around and smiling at people all day, even conversation with weird reclusive writers who barely leave the building.

“Ah, it’s going,” Hongjoong replies, trying for cheerful. Behind them, someone’s slowly moving cardboard boxes into the foyer, panting as they lift and squat and haul over the threshold. “Anything for me?”

The moment that Jongho tenses is framed and crystallised in a bright, bright technicolour, eyes darting nervously to his co-worker, Mingi, silently seeking help. Hongjoong sees them blink, stall, shift uncomfortably from foot to foot, and says nothing. Stands and watches. “Just – just some more stuff for Seojun-ssi,” he says, gesturing sharply at Mingi. The other receptionists starts, grabbing the keys to unlock the post. “It hasn’t all… stopped, yet.”

Hongjoong nods, face held carefully neutral. He knows what they want, what they expect – the hysterics, the waterworks. Anger, maybe, or rage. He’d thought the same, thought the weight of his loss would be urgent and inescapable and all-consuming, demanding to be felt at every turn. _Everyone grieves differently_ , the doctor had told him, but Hongjoong would rather the anger. Would rather the tears, than to feel like this – hollow, weightless, barely tethered to the ground beneath him. His grief as a cloud, as an exit wound – a clean, bloodless hole, dripping empty nothing onto the floor.

“Thanks, Jongho, I can take them,” he says, blinking under the weight of their combined gazes. The man in the entrance has paused, dropped into a crouch as he breathes shallowly against his knees, and Hongjoong winces sympathetically at the back of his head as he passes him on the way to the lift. His phone pings in his back pocket, Hongjoong smiling at Wooyoung’s message – _u sound like jeff bezos omg_ – as he unlocks the front door to his apartment and throws the small bundle of bills and magazine subscriptions a little violently into the bin. Then he stands over it, staring down at its contents and feeling a bit like the protagonist of a coming-of-age indie flick, wondering if he should light a match and burn it for good measure. Thinking of the security deposit and the over-sensitive fire alarms, he lets the lid bang shut. 

Hongjoong’s Friday nights are uneventful, these days. He’s settled into a sort-of routine, insofar as you could think of it as regular – sit around, scroll through his socials as the TV plays out some banal drama or reality show in the background, ignore his work, and turn down Wooyoung’s invitations to go out somewhere. Tonight, it’s a new fusion restaurant just opened somewhere in Hongdae that he’s apparently been dying to try; Hongjoong tells him that he’s already ordered food and turns his phone off. He’s sure he has some instant ramen left, anyway. The screen of his laptop comes to life as he scrubs his fingers over the trackpad, flickering traitorously to the chapter that’s been sitting in his documents, unfinished, for the better part of a month. He closes it, brings up a new Google tab instead.

The writer’s block was the most surprising side-effect of his boyfriend’s death, considering that, ever since he’s been able to read Korean, writing has been his most dependable source of emotional release. It stuck with him like a house-dog, like the pink, webbing indentation of an old scar against new skin – through the teenaged poetry and unfinished novellas and tuneless, hopeful lyricism collecting dust in his childhood bedroom, written before he realised he was better suited to prose than song; through the expensive degree, the student debt, through rejection after rejection after rejection. It clung to him like a phantom limb, curled tight around the soft, translucent nexus of his most fundamental self, and he feels its absence now with every intake of breath, with every sudden movement; critical, arresting. He stares down at the last sentence he wrote, a nonsense tract that had slipped out of him the night after Seojun’s funeral – _the man fell to his knees, god-struck, face thrown skyward_ – and deletes it in one, long backspace. Nothing new; nothing good.

Hongjoong loads Netflix, signs into the account under Seojun’s name (he’s been meaning to change it) and lets the first title he sees autoplay beneath the cursor, uncaring. He thinks blithely of the deadline, of its impossibility; thinks about his book, the one he’d been so excited for, the one Seojun had told him would be a smash-hit. Thinks about him reading the first draft and smiling, about him wrapping his arms around Hongjoong and pressing their bodies together, so close that they had felt almost one. He coughs and clicks on a film at random.

It hasn’t been playing for long, some awful straight-to-DVD meet-cute shipped over from the States that he’s barely managing to watch, before his doorbell buzzes, short and perfunctory. Hongjoong tilts his laptop lid almost shut, hefting himself into a sitting position against the arm of the sofa – he’s not expecting visitors. Obviously. He looks down, and the well-worn navy of his favourite joggers stares back up at him, the toothpaste stain he’d been too lazy to wash out that morning almost mockingly visible by the crook of his knee. The doorbell rings again.

“What?” Hongjoong huffs out as he opens the door, half-expecting to see Yunho back for round two or a sluttily-dressed Wooyoung begging him to come out. He stills, meeting the gaze of the man who’s definitely neither.

“Hi!” the man says, giving Hongjoong a dorky little wave. Hongjoong says nothing, frozen in place with a hand still curled protectively around the doorknob, feeling like all the blood has suddenly and unexpectedly drained out of him. He looks at the stranger; looks so hard that he thinks he might go cross-eyed, or maybe blind. He’s looking so unabashedly that he can feel the air growing awkward between them, the man flushing with consternation beneath the weight of Hongjoong’s gaze, but he can’t help it. He’s stupefied, struck dumb, unable to do more than stand and gape, wordless and slack-jawed and silly.

“Ah… hello?” the man tries, so uncomfortable that it comes out as a question. Hongjoong manages to clear his throat. “I’m Seonghwa, Park Seonghwa. I’ve just moved in across the hall, I thought I’d, erm… introduce myself.”

“Hi, Seonghwa,” Hongjoong breathes back, voice as soft and affected as a gust of wind, but what he really wants to say is _hello, who the fuck are you and why do you look exactly like the protagonist of the novel I’m currently unable to write_. Or maybe he just wants to cry. Seonghwa flushes as the silence stretches out between them, thick and cloying and awkward, cheeks turning a pretty shade of pink. He’s got nice cheekbones, Hongjoong thinks absently, all angle and curve. Just the way he wrote them. “Nice to meet you.”

“And you,” Seonghwa replies, looking as if it really isn’t. It strikes Hongjoong then that this definitely isn’t how his new neighbour had expected their conversation to go, is probably half-convinced that he hates him already, and blinks, looking into his eyes, an apology taking shape on his lips. He looks, and the full force of Seonghwa’s gaze is reflected back at him, bright-eyed and honeyed and earnest, and it’s like staring into the glassy edge of a lake, like staring into a mirror and not recognising the face staring back. Hongjoong takes a deep, shaky breath; it’s like staring into the face of the man you’ve been writing a book about, the man you imagined. The man you thought wasn’t real, except –

“Sorry,” Hongjoong says, suddenly so, so tired. Seonghwa frowns down at him, the expression achingly familiar, and it makes all the hairs on the back of Hongjoong’s neck prickle. “Sorry.” And he slams the door shut.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Meiosis: a figure of speech that minimizes the importance of something through euphemism. Meiosis is an attempt to downplay the significance or size of an unpleasant thing.


	2. Defamiliarization

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> major trigger warning from here on out for detailed discussions of terminal illness, specifically cancer. i wouldn’t recommend reading past this point if this is an upsetting topic for you. 
> 
> (the next few updates might be a bit slower due to uni hitting me with mid-semester exams for all my modules - stick with me!)

Maybe the grief has finally driven him mad. He’d consult the expert advice of his friends, except that Wooyoung would tell him to stop being so paranoid and just _talk_ to them about his apparently obvious ‘ocean of emotional repression’, and San would wring his hands and turn the conversation into a teary, impromptu therapy session because he’s gay and a Cancer and has a degree in Liberal Arts. Yunho would most likely throw Hongjoong into the boot of his car and drive him to an in-patient facility himself, which is why he’s taken the executive decision to tell none of them about this, no matter how strange it seems. They already think he’s skipping his doctor’s appointments.

Hongjoong can’t even bring himself to feel embarrassed about the night he first met his new neighbour. Some small, still-conscious corner of his brain had flooded with shame the moment he registered the lock clicking into place, nerves short-circuiting at the lingering image of Park Seonghwa’s face, twisted incredulously, imprinted neon-sharp behind his eyelids, but logical thought had become tangential, secondary, only distantly relevant. He had almost run to his laptop, cheeks burning, hands shaking so violently that he’d barely been able to open the Word documents as he scrolled through pages and pages of writing, all of it about him, every single word. He’d traced the novel back to its skeleton, back to that first, speculative little plan, back to the bones of its original character design – tall, dark-haired, with kind eyes. Mid-twenties but acts older, slender and finely-built, attractive with a touch of feline sensibility; just in the curve of his cheekbones, in the swell of his lips as he talks. Just a whisper. Hongjoong had slammed the lid of his laptop shut so hard that the screen had rattled in its metal frame, already crying.

His doorbell rings three times in quick, gun-fire succession. The pills rattle percussively in their yellow bottles and cardboard packets as Hongjoong shifts, drawing slowly to his feet, a miniature, medical symphony for one. They’re lined up on the white bathroom tiles in order, the way that Seojun would have taken them this morning – anti-nausea first, then the immuno-suppressants. This is important; the rest of the cocktail is too expensive to vomit back up. The doorbell rings again, loud and obnoxious, as if someone’s holding their finger down on the buzzer. Percocet, Zofran, dexamethasone; a fresh refill of Zoloft, but that’s his. Whoever’s outside is banging on the door now, clearly impatient. Hongjoong looks at himself in the mirror above the sink to make sure he’s presentable and _somebody_ stares back, although he’s not sure who. He doesn’t recognise them.

“You look like shit,” Wooyoung says when Hongjoong opens the door. He belatedly remembers they’d agreed to get coffee together last week, when Wooyoung had become convinced he’d tripped, fallen, and died somewhere in his apartment after he’d stopped replying to his messages. _I don’t want to find your body decomposing in the kitchen the next time I visit_ , he’d said over the phone, voice warbling with dramatic affectation. _What if you slipped in the shower? Do you want to die naked?_ Hongjoong had thought about how he was able to wrap his whole hand around Seojun’s wrist by the end, how all his clothes would fall off him no matter how tightly they pulled the belt, but said nothing.

“Just a bad night’s sleep. Someone was moving in across the hall all night,” he replies, even though it’s a lie, even though he hasn’t heard a peep out of Seonghwa since he slammed the door shut in his face. Wooyoung’s eyebrows raise as he peers across the hallway at the now-occupied apartment opposite, fingers reaching to straighten the black satin of his work tie out of habitual muscle-memory. He’s the smartest person Hongjoong knows, making big bucks as some kind of software engineer in inner-city Seoul, but the kind of smart that he would usually avoid like the plague – smart-kid smart, smarter-than-you smart, smart enough that he’s never had to truly work a day in his life for anything. The kind of guy who goes into the office on a Saturday just because he enjoys making everyone else look inept. Wooyoung turns back around, grinning sunnily at Hongjoong as he links their arms together, and, luckily for him, he’s charismatic enough that it doesn’t matter.

They leave behind the relative safety of the air-conditioned apartment complex, all linoleum and stretch lighting and neo plant-chic, Wooyoung waving with his free hand as they breeze past the front desk. Mingi watches him leave, eyes following their twin figures cross the foyer in one long, unblinking line, arms crossed over the broad planes of his chest. Hongjoong knows they’re fucking, but can’t bring himself to care. Wooyoung fucks a lot of people. They’re going to a new café a few streets away, one that’s just opened but Wooyoung swears makes the best frappés he’s ever tried, new enough that Hongjoong never got a chance to visit with Seojun. Like he said – smart. The bell above the door chimes as Wooyoung shoulders it open, sounding out their arrival to the coffee-shop full almost to capacity with nouveau-riche university students and irritable mid-morning commuters.

“Sit down before all the tables are taken,” Wooyoung says, gesturing to a dainty two-person flat-top tucked into a corner beside the toilets. It’s clearly just been vacated, twin coffee mugs and empty sugar packets sat as if waiting for someone to come back and claim them. A wooden stirrer lies, abandoned, atop the muddied rim of a glass, dripping cold americano onto the table-top. “What do you want?”

Hongjoong squints at the drinks menu above the counter, its Hangul printed in that bold, serpentine advertising font that sticks behind his eyelids when he blinks, and asks for a green tea. Wooyoung shrugs – he doesn’t believe in non-caffeinated beverages – and joins the end of the queue, letting Hongjoong wander off to claim the empty table before someone else snaps it up. He runs a napkin over its surface, watching the porous tissues soak up the sugar and coffee and grime, and when he closes his eyes he can still see the drinks orders traced like an inverted shadow in the darkness – small cappuccino, 4000 won; medium latte, 5000 won. Seojun would have scoffed at the prices and ordered a black tea, even though he was a habitual sweet-tooth who preferred mochas. Hongjoong imagines for a moment that it’s him sat opposite instead, fingers warming themselves around a mug as he teases Hongjoong for spending so much money on coffee, dark hair loose around his temples and smelling of Irish Spring. All these things he remembers about Seojun, these small, inconsequential details that make up the fabric of a person – his favourite drink, his favourite soap, the way he liked to style his hair on the weekends – rendered useless, relegated to the quiet recesses of memory. Nowhere to put them, nobody to give them to.

Wooyoung smiles as he sits down, sliding Hongjoong’s tea across the table. His caramel macchiato froths at the lip of its glass, foam catching on Wooyoung’s cheek as he takes a sip, and Hongjoong stares down into his mug, at the tea-leaves undulating slowly through the coloured water.

“Is this the first time you’ve been out all month?” Wooyoung asks, crossing one leg over the other. He’s slung his suit jacket over the brow of his chair, its dark cut shining the glossy iridescence of expensive fabric. 

“No,” Hongjoong says into his tea. “I’ve been shopping.”

Wooyoung scoffs, flicks at a speck of lint on his pressed work slacks. Fragments of conversation float over, half-intelligible, from the nearby tables, voices loud above the ambient hum of the coffee machines and upbeat café music. Wooyoung doesn’t ask about the book because he’s smart.

“Supermarkets don’t count, hyung,” he says, brown eyes wide when Hongjoong looks up to meet them.

“Says who?” he gripes, picking compulsively at a jagged fingernail. A child screams somewhere behind them as their mother shushes and coos.

“Says me,” Wooyoung trills back, smiling toothily as he takes another long sip of his coffee. “Humans are pack animals, hyung. You’ll go crazy if you keep yourself locked up forever.”

Hongjoong doesn’t mention that he thinks that he might already have, that something must be wrong with him to believe that one of his characters is alive and real and has just moved into the apartment opposite. He gets the feeling Wooyoung wouldn’t be convinced.

“I’m fine, Wooyoung,” he says instead, blowing on his tea and watching as his breath makes miniature ripples across its surface. “Everything’s fine. Honestly.”

Wooyoung raises an eyebrow, mouth curving in disdain. Hongjoong sighs, leaning down to take a first, tentative sip of his drink.

“I mean – yeah, it’s hard, but I’m surviving, aren’t I? Nowhere to go except up.” That was what his doctor had said as she’d filled out his first prescription for antidepressants. It had felt jarringly blithe at the time, more like something you’d read in a get-well-soon card than legitimate medical advice.

“You could always try talking to San or Yunho about how you feel,” Wooyoung says, leaning back to cast his gaze around the shop floor. His posture is casual, one arm slung around the back of his chair, but Hongjoong can tell he’s avoiding him. “They’d get it.”

“I do talk to San and Yunho,” he bites back, ignoring the implication. Wooyoung snorts.

“Yeah, when you tell them to fuck off.”

“I don’t – I don’t tell them to _fuck off_ ,” Hongjoong scoffs, taking another sip of tea. It’s his turn to be evasive, cheeks warming beneath Wooyoung’s gaze.

“You might as well,” he says, a finger tapping lazily against the ceramic rim of his coffee mug. His nails are neat, clipped to short, uniform white crescents. “San cries about it a lot, you know. He feels personally responsible.”

“He shouldn’t,” Hongjoong mutters. It makes him feel bad, but only a little.

“Yeah, _I_ know that, but he’s a baby, hyung. Needs lots of reassurance.” Hongjoong bristles, fingers stiffening around his mug; as if sensing that he’s about to push it a shade too far, Wooyoung adds, “he just wants to help; they both do. You should let them.”

Hongjoong pauses, runs his tongue over his teeth, huffs out a small, contemplative breath. It’s begun to rain, and the soft palpitations of water against the windows sound like a damp heart-beat cutting across the shop floor. He wants to say that he would except that doesn’t know how; that every time he looks at San, he sees the night he and Seojun first met. That every time he looks at Yunho he sees that room in the hospital, sees the door as he’s begging to leave. Hongjoong looks up at Wooyoung and doesn’t know what he wants to say, doesn’t know what words his lips are moving to form, except –

“That’s him. The new neighbour.”

Wooyoung twists, following Hongjoong’s gaze as he nods towards the end of the queue. He looks taller than he had last night, dressed in a cream turtleneck and dark-wash jeans that draw out the length of his leg; more real, too, under the fluorescent opaline of the café lighting. Less like a figment of Hongjoong’s imagination. As if he can feel their eyes on him Seonghwa turns, blinking, to face Hongjoong’s table, slim fingers clasped together in a knot resting below his stomach. They make awkward eye contact, staring at one another a beat too long; Hongjoong can feel his cheeks colouring, just a little.

“Oh,” Wooyoung says. They look at each other, and Hongjoong immediately knows what he’s thinking. He scowls. “You didn’t tell me he’s hot.”

“Please don’t fuck my neighbour, Wooyoung-ah,” Hongjoong bites. Wooyoung just gestures expansively, eyes following Seonghwa as he steps up to order. Hongjoong can’t bring himself to turn around a second time, but judging from the look on Wooyoung’s face he clearly likes what he sees. 

“So little faith in me, hyung,” he says, and Hongjoong doesn’t mention that he’s already sleeping with one of his building’s staff members, that it’s awkward enough having to answer Mingi’s evasively-worded enquiries after Wooyoung’s whereabouts. “I can look, though, can’t I?”

Hongjoong shrugs. He can do what he wants, so long as it’s not ten feet away from him in potential ear-shot. So long as it’s not with Park Seonghwa, the man who has seemingly, inexplicably walked out of the pages of his manuscript into the apartment next door. He stares bitterly down into his mug, watching the dregs fall over themselves in the whorled remainders of his tea and thinking about the last chapter he had managed to finish before the oncologist told Seojun it was terminal. He thinks about the chapter, but in his mind all he sees is Seonghwa.

“This is good, Hongjoong-ssi. I think we can do something with this.”

Yeosang’s being nice, which isn’t unusual – Hongjoong’s unsure if he’s biologically capable of being unkind. He rubs a hand across his eyes, still heavy-lidded with fatigue, and blinks against the heady, turpentine pallor of the Seoul horizon. It’s a Sunday morning, which has always belonged to Yeosang – his editor, but also his third-year university flatmate and industry friend. Things tended to become a little nepotistic within creative circles.

“I think you’re lying,” Hongjoong calls out from the kitchenette. “Do you want anything to eat?”

“No thanks,” Yeosang replies, the low timbre of his voice muffled through the wall. Hongjoong shrugs; he’s making bulgogi from scratch, mostly because it’s difficult and involved. He likes having something to do with his hands. “And I’m not, Hongjoong-ssi. It’s good. Very, you know – raw.”

Depressing, he means, which isn’t untrue. They’re sorting through the chapters he had worked on the last few months before Seojun died, when he had become too sick to leave the hospital and his treatment had shifted from fighting the cancer to palliative care, back when Hongjoong was still able to write. Back when he had something to say.

“It’s self-indulgent, Yeosang. Narcissistic bullshit.” He had written about anything and everything, uncaring of whether it made for a good story or not – long, rambling diatribes on the transience of existence, philosophical musings that were barely coherent when he read them back, and lot about grief – grief and release. Hongjoong tears the marinade packet open in a single motion and empties it into a bowl. What had he known about grief, then?

“It’s honest,” Yeosang says, ever the optimist, crossing the open-plan living room to lean against the kitchen door-frame. “And suffering always makes for good art.”

Hongjoong looks away, stares down at the cut of beef on his chopping board. It’s pink and tender, fissured by the snake of a thin red artery and leaking blood onto the plastic surface. He used to think the same, that you had to hurt to be a good writer, and yet here he is – mourning, suffering, and paralysed by it. Rendered meaningless through loss. And – what’s the point of suffering if it doesn’t mean anything? Hongjoong spears the sharp edge of the knife into the meat, cutting through flesh in a single suture. What’s the point of suffering if nobody sees?

“Did you know I’ve got a new neighbour?” Hongjoong asks, because if they don’t change the subject he might start crying. If Yeosang is taken aback he doesn’t show it, just nods speculatively in Hongjoong’s direction.

“Yeah, Jongho mentioned. Park Seonghwa, right?”

Hongjoong’s hand stills over the beef. “You talk to Jongho?”

Yeosang shrugs, eyes fixed somewhere nondescript on the kitchen tiles. The knife is dripping blood on the chopping board in a musical, one-two rhythm where Hongjoong holds it outstretched. “Sometimes.”

 _Sometimes_. Great. Are all of his friends determined to make his life that much harder by fucking around with the staff members he has to interact with on a daily basis?

“He’s a nice guy, you could do worse,” Yeosang continues, which makes Hongjoong pause again.

“You know him?” he asks, setting the knife down and canting a hip against the counter. The light above the kitchen flickers, humming softly with electricity, a wiring issue that he’d never gotten fixed.

“Yeah – he’s a publicist, did some commission work for us a few months ago,” Yeosang says, slipping his glasses off to clean them with the sleeve of his jumper. “He was really good actually; I don’t know why we didn’t keep him on.” He shrugs as if to say – budget cuts, competitive Seoul job market, management didn’t like his face. Any and all of the above.

“Do you think he looks familiar?” Hongjoong asks, mouth working faster than his brain, but he can’t help himself – Yeosang is the only person who knows his book as well as him, maybe better. He needs to know if he sees it too.

Yeosang pauses. “In what way?”

Hongjoong stares back down at the raw meat so he doesn’t have to look Yeosang in the eye, afraid he’ll do or say something stupid. The light flashes, a pulse of excess electricity momentarily flooding the kitchen with too much illumination. “Just… does he remind you of anyone?”

There’s a beat of silence between them, and then he hears Yeosang click his tongue against his teeth. “Is this you trying to ask me if I think he’s hot? I appreciate the thought, Hongjoong-ssi, but I’m not really looking for –”

“No – no, don’t worry. Forget I said anything.” Hongjoong’s grip tightens around the handle of the knife until it hurts; maybe he really has gone mad. Every reader interprets text differently and imagines characters the way they want to see them, but it’s so obvious to Hongjoong, so ironclad. Instead of bursting into tears, he says, “I don’t think I made a very good first impression; he probably thinks I’m weirdo.”

Yeosang’s gaze is steady when Hongjoong meets it, glasses returned to their perch on the bridge of his nose. He’s not looking at him with pity, which Hongjoong is grateful for – he’s not sure if he could stand that – but with an expression that’s somehow deeper, more quizzical. “I don’t know, he didn’t seem like the judgemental type. You should give him another go.”

Hongjoong smiles, pressing his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “You setting us up on a play-date, Yeosang-ah?” he asks, drawing out his editor’s name in a joking sing-song. Yeosang just hums, mouth quirking with amusement.

“You can never have too many friends, Hongjoong-ssi.”

It’s late that night before Hongjoong manages to fall asleep, late enough that he catches the opening throes of morning bird-song as his mind begins to drift off. For the first time in a long time, however, he’s not thinking about Seojun, about the phantom weight of his body in the bed beside him, of the sound of his unconscious, sleep-soft breaths, of the colour of his skin beneath the white hospital strip-lighting. As Hongjoong’s eyes close, cheek pressed up against the pillow that still smells of his dead lover, he thinks of Park Seonghwa and his familiar, familiar face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Defamiliarization: the artistic technique of turning something mundane into something odd, strange, and unfamiliar.


End file.
